I am pleased to present the final version of AVOIDAL. It has gone through heavy changes since my last post-compo post.

I’ve been working very hard on it since Ludum Dare concluded and have put about 30 more hours of work into it (or about 50 or so total on this game so far.) I wanted to be able to get this finished in time to submit to August’s Experimental Gameplay Project since I was aware of their theme of “Zero Buttons” while I worked on this and I was able to do it!

Big thanks to Sparky who has given me a TON of invaluable feedback and ideas while tweaking this final version.

The menu should read v1.0.7 or greater in the top-left or your cache is old.

RECENT VERSION HISTORY

v1.0.7 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Made HUD a little less cluttered

v1.0.6 – Posted 8/30/2010

• Combo introduced and capped to x5 multiplier
• Mines now can start moving around at higher levels
• New “Mine Streak” bonus awards at 10,25,50,75,100,150,200
• New menu layout
• Tracks local highscore, highest streak and difficulty for local replayabilty and challenge
• More sounds added for new notices and awards

v1.0.5 – Posted 8/30/10

• New visual effect and sound effect for when a spike hits a mine (to differentiate and add variety from when a seeker hits a mine)
• Smoother angled robot effect when mouse moves left and right
• Smoke toned down to be less distracting
• Mine lifespan increased at beginning to 6 seconds instead of 4
• Added a 10 frame damage image to the robot torso to also help show player health
• Adjusted game to run at 60FPS instead of 30FPS
• Smoke now appears behind player sprite
• Fixed score bug

v1.0.4 – Updated 8/29/10

• More changes to difficulty curve based on feedback
• Added Animation on How To Play screen to easily explain game mechanics instead of having as much text to read

Some people have been complaining that my entry was too hard. Perhaps it is,but I was playing on it tonight and I managed to get to wave 9 of 10, almost completed it!

The ranking system is definitely all over the place, I will need to take a look at it once the competition is over

Well I’m been putting this off for a while but I might as well do it now.

This past LD was quite the challenge for me, especially the theme, I found myself unmotivated by the fact that the theme more or less dictated most of the gameplay, thus more or less disallowing me to go about my usual “wing-it” strategy. I had this idea for a game pop into my head the night before the compo as I was about to fall asleep, and I was really hoping for “Hidden depths” or whatever to win so that I could use it. My mistake was probably getting so excited about that one idea, and as a result, when I got the actual theme I was too disappointed to bother looking further into the theme. I went for a walk and got an idea as to how I would make my game concept work with the theme, and got really excited. The idea was that your character would get parts from enemies and would then craft weapons out of said parts. The idea quickly died as I realized I’d be spending my whole 48/72 hours fighting the inventory system. Once again moping about, I noticed Hamumu had posted some of his ideas for anyone to use, and, desperate as I was I read away.

One of his ideas, which I don’t remember at this time, sparked an idea in my mind: Have turrets shoot circuit boards that power electric gate things! It wasn’t much, but I figured I could cram it into my game concept from the night before. And then I started work on D3SCENT.

It was interesting to make a game that focused on storyline first, game mechanics second, as I almost always do the opposite, “Oh, here’s the engine, time to staple on a couple lines of humorous dialogue”. I quickly realized that for D3SCENT to be a success I’d need to focus on story first, which ended up being true, once I had the story in place I was able to create the ambiance and world it called for, and meant I didn’t have to go back and tweak the whole world to make it fit with the storyline.

I’m very happy with my end result, heck, it got featured on Byetjacker, but I’m tired of fighting with and for gamemaker. I should be getting flash CS5 sometime soon, so I’ll try working with that a bit. Though I’ll probably have to stick with GM for the next LD or two until I’m comfortable with flash.

I have found a few game sites with my Ludum Dare entry, Money Thief as one of their games. They have published this without my consent, and I’m not sure how to get them to take it down.

A quick Google search for “Money Thief game” shows at least two sites with it featured as one of their games. The only site I’ve actually uploaded it to are Kongregate and my own site.

What do you guys recommend? I’m going to go ahead and site-lock my entry and my version on Kongregate, but how can I get these other guys to take it down?

Since there was such a good response to my LD#18 entry entitled Infiltrator, I’ve been working on-and-off on a post-compo edition. It’s nearly done.

A list of what I have done so far can be found by clicking “read more.” (For now, just a raw dump of my changelog summaries. I’ll put together a more complete list of what’s new once I am done.)

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Hello folks. I’ve been tinkering with my entry for a while now, and I’m ready to release a second post-competition version. This is a much more substantial release than the previous, and contains a number of changes which greatly alter the way it plays. The flow between offense and defense still isn’t quite the way I want it to be, so I’ll continue development for at least a few more days. Feedback would be very much appreciated.

Current version: http://vacuumflowers.com/temp/bubble_tag_current

Changes include:

• Defensive walls
• Boulders which supply resources (for repairing walls)
• Bubbles now act as shields
• Bubble size reflects current health- this acts as a HUD-less indicator of health. It also means that the more health we have, the easier we are to hit.
• Part count is now capped- destroy the core of a larger enemy base to upgrade
• Lots of tuning

I would also like to thank HybridMind, who helped test and had some good suggestions.

My foiled post.

Things that went right:

• Cooking. I didn’t like the theme and had no ideas (and I’m pretty sure I voted for the theme). So I went and cooked dinner and ended up with a really good idea. Well, I thought so.

Things that went wrong:

• I tried to get Slick 2D working a few hours before the compo started. I couldn’t get a simple blank screen up in an applet. So I gave up and switched to Canvas.
• I didn’t have a javascript framework ready ahead of time. I tried to shave some time off by re-implementing some of the code I used in LD17, but creating an engine in javascript just sucked a lot of time away.
• I needed path finding and grabbed a random javascript A* implementation off the web. Other than having issues integrating it, I also ran into performance issues. And in retrospect I’d have ran into licensing issues since there was no explicit license. This past week, I’ve been converting a fast implementation of A* to javascript. The old A* took 2,240 milliseconds to path a very simple blockade. The new A* took 100 milliseconds to path the same blockade. An order of magnitude better, awesome! Except I need less than 16 milliseconds to fit within a frame, so I need to break the algorithm up so I can compute it over several frames. In javascript. No thank you.
• I tried to write a game in javascript. Being weakly typed, I ran into so many bugs that should have been caught at compile time. Typo one variable name and the interpreter just creates an instance of it. Nice. I also ran into problems with firebug. Things like infinite loops causing the debugger to not function. Even if you put a breakpoint in before the infinite loop starts. I switched over to Chrome and had less issues. But I don’t think I’m ever going to write anything this complex in javascript again. Spending hours tracking down things that a compiler could’ve caught in seconds is not my idea of productivity.

What I’ll do in the future:

• Check out and vet my tools ahead of time. I think I’ll try Unity. Or Slick 2D again (with more time spent getting to know it). Or anything that’s strongly typed. =p
• I may continue with my tower defense idea, because I still think it’s a good game. But I’m trashing the code I’ve got so far in favor of something more fun to develop in.

This LD was very fun and I hope to participate on more of them soon. The Spacenoid source is already cleaned, but I don’t know if it’s permited to update the source on voting time so I’l upload it at the end of the voting phase.

Some things went well it the game, others not so much. What I failed with:

-The game was too buggy.

-Although an interesting concept it didn’t offer much.

-The music was awful.

-The “Fail Ship”, as I like to call, can be a little too distracting and inacurative.

-A mouse control would be better for it.

Oh well, it was fun anyway and I’m making a remake called Spacenoid DX, and it will fix Spacenoid’s issues and add a couple more stuff. No screenshots at the moment but I will show some soon.

Postentry

So I finish!!!! Yeah, a little late, but I’m done.

I know it couldn’t compete in the jam, but following that ultramotivational posters, I know this must get done.

Cause I cant work the next 24 hours on the jam (monday agenda), I decide to pause my project and restart it the next weekend. So you can play AWARENESS here.

Postmortem

The obvious subject I must talk is my entry delay. Since I didn’t design anything in the first 24 hours, this rans everything away; also I knew early that, surely, I couldn’t enter on the compo either the jam (cause I already had my Monday arranged). The only think I miss about not been applied were having a wide voting and people comments.

The theme was a little bit hard to take from frontside, and my newcomer nervousness hindered me to adopt any design idea. I must admit that this isn’t one of my best game ideas (I doubt the whole thing while coding) but if I want to finish this game, I must convince myself and trust the instinct.

I was distracted a lot, I went to the movies (to see predators), redrawing images 4 times, and spent hours on wikipedia ‘researching’… that adds presure when you don’t have your design ready.

The design results in simple ideas: a short game (less than 5 minutes to play), use simple mechanics appealing on player’s physical dexterity, and allow him to ‘play’ with fake physics. Aestheticaly I wanted that to make the player feels in control of the situation, even if he must react to the attacks; and provide an attractive challenge curve with little rewards. The theme and graphics were inspired by the course of the golden flower images.

Coding and drawing wasn’t a problem (even if they look messy). Besides an awful angle calculation issue, I feel confortable with flixel (it isn’t the 7th wonder, but helps you to work fast). I felt confortable with the tools. The pipeline was very straight when things were clear: idea + calculation + draw (x4) + code + recalculation + code + (doubt) + grapich retouch + audio + code glace; and lot of playtesting.

What do I learn and should do/avoid on next LD’s (and other projects):

- Finish what you start. Even if deadline is over, or the idea isn’t good enough for you damn perfectionist.

- I must practice rapid/random gamedesign.

- Avoid distractions, use them as a weapon to clear your mind and let him think alone.

Questions for you

Did you quit the compo, or didn’t finish on time? Why? Do you agree with my first conclusion? Sounds fair for you?

And did you play my game? What do you think about it?

I made some adjustments in my game and fix some bugs:

->The ant does not stop instantly when it hits the wall, now it bounces off softly.
->Fixed errors in the saving system.
->The bullets of weapons destroy each other.
->The leaves recover life completely.

Download: http://dc152.4shared.com/download/96-7VECM/Anthill_V2.rar?tsid=20100829-005355-26bf694f

Until more guys!

Well, it is a week now since I started working on Alpha Channel for LD#18, my first such competition. In fact, the first time I tried to make a real-time game in nearly a decade, I think!

I came in with no pre-conceived game-ideas, but was really happy that the theme was one that would give me ideas on how the develop game mechanics. I already wrote a journal of how the steps in development went, but I thought I’d discuss my post-competition thoughts now that I’ve had time to relax and to look at 30 other entries.

Apologies now, in case I go on a bit (I know I will )…

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Since a couple of issues with the random number generator conspired to make the game a little harder than it needed to be, I’ve done a post-compo version of the game.  The changes are:

• Altered fungi generation to always leave a gap for the player to get through.
• Altered fungi generation to ensure the full range of fungus types appear within a reasonable timeframe.
• Weighted weapon toadstools to appear mostly on the front of the ship.
• Added menu to the title screen.
• Added easy mode (less ship inertia, less frequent (and not intensifying) spores, less frequent boulders).

And I’ve also uploaded a couple of videos of me playing through the game (spoilers, obv.):

Peaceful playthrough

Destructive playthrough

They’re slightly jittery because I had a hard time finding a screen recorder that actually worked. Fraps, camstudio, and taksi were all far too slow; I wound up using gtk-record-my-desktop on Linux (which I have on a different partition on the same machine, so it’s not a hardware issue).

http://illusionaldesign.net/Post_LD18_BigBoy_bin.rar

Did some work on Big Boy during the week to get it to a more complete and runnable stage. Heres the changes:

- Used a fixed time step to make physics, etc more stable

- Revamped the physics and collisions

- Cats can now be thrown properly

- You can now die and there is a game over state

- Added some extra sounds

- Variations in enemy sprites (purple/pink cats)

I need to do more work on the AI but the game is quite playable now Enjoy

With so many entries this time around, I know that I won’t be able to play every game, and I’ll probably be missing out on some really cool ones. I know that after the voting, I can look through the results to find the best rated ones, but this doesn’t apply to jam entries, and it’d be nice to get exposed to the compo ones while I can still express my opinion through voting.

Some great games have gotten some good press already, but I know there has to be more out there! What are some “hidden gems” that you’ve found? Games that we shouldn’t miss? Games with great stories and moods, technical beauties, or ones that excel in categories that don’t really align with any of the voting categories? Share them here!

Guys and girl(s), when you make a game with keyboard input, please remember that not everybody is using a qwerty keymap. There are others, like azerty (French), qwertz, bépo, dvorak, and another one whose name I forgot.

So for example wasd for movement is pretty terrible and totally unplayable on an azerty keyboard… *Unless* you use scancodes and not ascii codes to bind keys to actions. That is to say, use the position of the key on the keyboard and not the letter that’s printed on it.

How to do that will depend on your framework/engine/OS of choice.

Other solutions:
- use non-moving keys like shift, alt, ctrl, space, the arrows, return, etc. (Some combinations can be problematic, for example DOWN+LEFT+CTRL doesn’t work here.)
- let the player choose his or her key mappings.

I can change my keymap to qwerty before playing your game, and set it back to azerty after, but it’s a pain…

Last week I participated in Ludum Dare 18 and after some intense work delivered an interesting little game called Protractor, here’s a link to my competition entry.  Leading up to the comp I played some winners of the previous Ludum Dare to get a good feel for what I could hope to accomplish.  I prepped my dev environment, picked up groceries, and set up a special SVN branch for this comp so I could make engine hacks or workarounds without any worry about breaking other projects.

On Friday night when the theme was announced I just sat there and thought while scribbling some ideas on paper.  I wanted to do something with physics and attaching enemies or weapons to yourself.  At first I was thinking of doing a round planet with humanoid figures using telekinesis.  I started to set this up in code but wasn’t really feeling the idea so I just went to sleep.

Saturday morning I took a quick look at games with a similar concept for inspiration, specifically TUMIKI Fighter and Captian Forever.  My design is based on simple abstract shapes so they are easy to recognize on form alone allowing for the color to represent health.  I also planned on having random weapons with random colors and lots of trails all over the place.  For color values I have it set up so I can randomize over HSV space to get away from the RGB kind of look.

Building off the clean project in my game engine I set up an object oriented structure where there’s a base class shared by the player and enemies, a base class shared by all part types, and everything derives from a GameObject which is part of the engine.  By about 3 PM Saturday I had the player moving around with the ability to pick up parts and attach them.  But so far the only part was a weapon and it was always the same default weapon.  I took at least 2 hours to put some polish on that system with grabbing and attaching the weapon parts.

Around this time I did a little art pass: tweaking colors, particle systems and other visual aspects.  I threw in an enemy that just randomly tried to pull parts to it and shoot.  By the end of Saturday night I wanted to have all of the core functionality in game so I could take the next day to add better AI, polish, balance and tweak.  So I trudged along adding the other 3 part types in a very rough state.  Around midnight Saturday night I posted a screen shot to demonstrate the core functionality.

Sunday I started out by just tweaking lots of little things.  There needed to be some background for movement reference so I just threw in an extremely simple particle system of gray squares.  I worked on the AI a bit and improving their tractor beam use a little.  I made them move around pretty much randomly in near the player.  I tried having them turn to aim but that isn’t very reliable because of their poor ability to configure their ship so I just made them cheat and rotate their weapons directly.  There just really wasn’t enough time to make any kind of real AI at this point.  For all this time I just had the player spawn in next to some parts and an enemy that I had all placed in the editor so I added logic to randomly spawn in enemies and parts out of view of the camera.

This felt good enough so I wanted to spend some time adding random weapons to add both visual flair and gameplay depth.  As a simple balance measure all weapons have the same DPS with different firing rate, bullet damage, and bullet count.  Other aspects like speed, spread, and color are just randomized.  It seemed like a big part of this game was reading where damage was coming from and going too so I had an idea to make bullet size proportional to their damage to facilitate a quick visual read.

As the deadline loomed I started to freak out a little becuase there were only a few hours left and I harly spent any time actually playing my game.  So I took a while to just play and polish random gameplay issues.  I experimented with several different control schemes but decided to go with the simplest which seemed like a good enough choice given limited time.  I threw in some random large solid black boxes to both add an interesting element to game play and visuals while also making the world feel more solid to the player.

With about an hour left I focused on sound by adding more firing sounds and a tractor attach sound.  I scaled fire sound frequency by bullet damage so weaker weapons sound higher pitched to make it sound a little more dynamic.  In the last half hour I just tried to play my game only tweaking a few minor things.  I had a score display of how many enemies were killed with high score tracking but decided to remove it a the last minute.  Adding a scoring system can add a lot to a game but it can also detract if done incorrectly.  I like the idea of just providing a pure experience without the need for imposed goals. The implicit goal of growing your ship is as motivating a factor as any.

It’s was hard to come up with a name for my game in such a short period of time.  I went with Protractor because it sounds sort of abstract and mathematical while also containing the word tractor for tractor beam.  I’m happy with the way my entry turned out and after playing it for a bit since then it still seems to hold up pretty well.  Next time I’d like to try to get some testers lined up, people offered but I was so focused on working that I didn’t take the time to contact anyone.  Also I’d like to plan my time a little better so at the end I have more time to just play and tweak.

It’s impressive how well put together the Ludum Dare competition is.  The judging phase is currently in progress and it’s great fun playing everyone’s game and doing my best to judge.  It’s sort of like playing Wario Ware on a grand scale.  Thanks to everyone who put it together and congrats to those who successfully delivered a game.

And another competition has gone by… Awesome fun this one…

Time for a quick postmortem of my entry, Conquest:

What Went Right

- Theme: My first impact with the theme was “I hate this one”… On retrospective, it is an awesome theme, really made me think out of the box
- Initial concept: although it took me 3 hours, I got an idea that really got me excited and thought it fit the theme
- Excitement throughout: I was excited with the game the whole time, instead of being excited for 2 or 3 hours and then losing momentum.
- Tracing: the idea to trace over the graphics made by Oryx for the Assemblee competition for the characters was great: it allowed me to save time and have something passable visually.
- Music: I was scared of leaving the music for the end, and with good reason… didn’t have much time to do it, and had to use WolframTones… Although my first tries didn’t yield anything decent, after a bit tweaking the parameters I got something that while it isn’t Mozart, it’s passable for 48 hour game music…
- Cutscenes: While not terribly interesting, I really love doing those small cutscenes, they add to the flavor and they’re fun to program (even though they took me 2 or 3 hours to get right)
- Using my LD framework instead of my engine: I was going to participate on the jam instead of the compo, but looking at the idea I had (and the fact I thought I would take 10 or 12 hours completing the game) made me go for the compo. My engine wouldn’t have given me any advantage over the framework anyway…

What went wrong

- Time managment: What I thought it was going to be a 10 hour development cycle for this kind of game turned into 28 hour… So my managment and estimation was appaling.
- Family visiting: Although I love having people over, having family visiting on the weekend took away some time I could have spend programming… thankfully my wife did most stuff by herself, leaving me with just entertaining the guests… while I wasn’t running towards my office to program a couple more lines (jeez, I sound like an addict… )
- Bugs: Ran into some bugs after the deadline, which meant the game seems more buggy to everyone than it seems to me… :\

What went “meh”

- Thousands of ideas flowing through my mind while I programmed the game… This is a mixed blessing… I look at the game as it could be, while people will look at the game as it is… Lots of ideas made me be excited about the game the whole time, but it also was source for some frustration, since I couldn’t put everything I was thinking off…

The game has circa 2000 lines of C++ code, and the framework about 17000 (most of it 3d related and stuff I’m not using though).

Tools used:

Code: Visual Studio 2005
APIs: DirectX 9 (Feb), FMod, Win32
Graphics: Photoshop CS4 (mostly traced from Oryx’s pack for the TIGSource Assemblee compo), 3d Studio Max 2010 (for title screen)
Sound: WolframTones (very awesome, only had 20 mins or so to play with it), Midi Converter Free (online free midi to mp3 converter)
Blogging: Zoundry Raven, Internet Explorer
Reading LD: Omea Reader
Listening music: Winamp

I’ll probably want to play around with this idea for a bit longer, add some of the ideas I’ve had during the development… Hopefully I’ll post the new version in the future, albeit I don’t know when, since I’m starting a new job next week… :\

“Alien Super Mega Blaster” in play test  and can be downloaded and installed on your XBOX for those of you with an XNA Creators Club account.

http://tinyurl.com/23h3cr6

Same gameplay as LD18 submission, just changed a couple classes to allow the game to  be controlled via a game pad and added a splash screen for selection of the active controller.  The last remaining change was to tweak the rendering to allow the 800 by 480 resolution to be displayed centrally on a TV screen.

The windows compo version is still here  and appreciate all the feedback: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-18/?action=preview&uid=1516

Indiegames.com, ByteJacker and more. Hit the jump to see what the rest of the internet thinks about how you spent your weekend.

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Just wanted to let people know that the source code for every single compo entry has been verified and is available for download.

That’s 172 games, all with source code, for your learning pleasure.

I’d like to request that if you did a jam entry to consider uploading the source as well, if you can, because it is just cool to do so.